Dominic Grieve: we're a changing nation, but I’m an optimist

The Attorney General believes Tory values must adapt to today’s world, he
tells Benedict Brogan

Attorney General Dominic GrievePhoto: EDDIE MULHOLLAND FOR THE TELEGRAPH

By Benedict Brogan

9:45PM GMT 22 Nov 2013

The Attorney General’s office in the Palace of Westminster, along with those of the other law officers, is kept away from those of Government ministers to emphasise a sense of separation between, as it were, the front-line politicians and those appointed to give them legal advice. Building works mean there is no natural light in his high-ceilinged room at the moment. Apart and in the dark might be how some would like to describe Dominic Grieve. But that would be to misunderstand both the role and the man. As the Government’s lawyer he sits in Cabinet and is in the thick of most major policy debates, while as a Conservative MP he is both acutely aware of the challenges the Tories face and clear about what they should do. Above all, the fastidious lawyer is a politician who is more than willing to speak his mind on issues other colleagues shy away from, as he is about to prove.

When we meet he is just back from the Falklands, where he chaired the conference of the attorneys general of the British Overseas Territories. They usually meet in the Caribbean, but Mr Grieve wanted to underscore the importance of the islands, where he found economic optimism despite the irritations caused by the “interference” of Argentina. The week after next he moves on to Brussels to set out “frankly” some of the problems caused by European law and its myriad confusions.

Mr Grieve is a barrister and a QC who sees the EU as above all a legal construction: its problems stem from the drafting and subsequent interpretation of its treaties. “But the frustrations are real ones and need to be identified.” Frustrations is a polite way of describing what is wrong with the EU. Mr Grieve will play a central role in David Cameron’s discussions for preparing a renegotiation. His Tory critics portray him as a Europhile, but he does not need to be told about the EU’s capacity for overreaching itself.

“Part of the underlying concern is the EU has a great deal of creep about it. There is a tendency for it to widen its sphere into areas in which the treaties don’t require it to go. This is a big theme the Prime Minister’s picked up.” But it goes further, he says. Where EU laws do not work, you end up with a democratic deficit, and a loss of public support. “There is a lot of evidence throughout Europe that the electorates in many countries do not have much respect for EU institutions.”

At the moment nothing exercises Tory MPs more, it seems, than the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights and their apparent abuse by criminals and terrorists. Neither has anything to do with the EU, but they are wrapped up in the debate about our place in Europe. Ministers have promised that the Tories will fight the 2015 election on a manifesto pledge to scrap the Human Rights Act. They did the same in 2010, when they promised to replace it with a British Bill of Rights. Objections from the Liberal Democrats and the complication of the vote on Scottish independence next year have put plans for an alternative to the Act on hold.

Contrary to what many of his colleagues believe, Mr Grieve would be happy to see the Act replaced by a British Bill of Rights. Indeed, he expects ministers to bring forward proposals next year. He points out, however, that if Conservatives want substantial change, they will have also to withdraw the United Kingdom from the ECHR. Easily done, but at what price? “The UK is one of the principal architects of what I would call the international order, that is the process by which we persuade countries to sign up to international agreements and adhere to them over many things.” He asked the Foreign Office, which told him Britain had been signatory to about 13,200 international agreements since 1813. He evidently fears that by withdrawing from a major agreement, Britain will set a terrible example. “I can understand the irritation of colleagues, but … one has to think very carefully before withdrawing from an international agreement that is seen as being a benchmark for human rights in 47 member states.”

Mr Grieve accepts that we cannot base decisions on what is good for Britain on whether others would be cross with us. He points out that of the 2,000 cases brought against the country last year, we lost just 10. The trouble is some of those attract a great deal of public anger. Did he, for example, like Mr Cameron, feel “physically sick” when Strasbourg ruled that prisoners should be given the vote? “I don’t think I would say it made me sick, no, but I do happen to think it is a mistaken interpretation of the law.”

His idea of a British Bill of Rights would pull together the basic principles that define how the UK works. Not a “mini-constitution” but some fundamentals that call on British history. Why? Because “the Human Rights Act has always been seen as being a rather imported foreign document”.

“If you give rights to people you dislike it is actually a sign of your confidence and our own values, and that’s the importance of human rights,” he says. “But at the moment the debate has tended to see it as just a way that rights are being used to bang the law-abiding over the head and force them to do things or accept things that they find irksome. And that’s not a desirable state of affairs.”

As an MP, he observes that people lack confidence about the future. They worry about “the pace of change, immigration, the extent to which the nation state has a future, the extent to which the democratic processes operate properly or not”. His constituency, Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, has a considerable ethnic minority population of immigrants, so he is outspoken on the benefits and costs of immigration. Governing involves hard choices. “We have managed integration of minority communities better than most countries in Europe.”

But that requires maintaining the rule of law, democratic institutions and stemming corruption. The problem is growing, he says, because some minority communities “come from backgrounds where corruption is endemic. We as politicians have to wake to up to it”. As if he was not being candid enough, he cites the South Asian communities, and the Pakistani community in particular. This is risky territory for any politician, but as a lawyer he is quite deliberate. The rule of law is what defines us as a nation. Many immigrants, he explains, “come from societies where they have been brought up to believe you can only get certain things through a favour culture. One of the things you have to make absolutely clear is that that is not the case and it’s not acceptable. As politicians these are issues we need to pay some attention to”.

Mr Grieve accepts there are fears about the imminent lifting of restrictions on migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, but he stresses the “success” of immigrant communities in his constituency. “I am at root an optimist about the UK’s future.” His children and perhaps his grandchildren after him are going to be living in a different country, he says. “The population is going to grow whatever we do on the back of Labour’s open door migration policies and I rather regret that. But I think these are all challenges we can cope with and actually there are some benefits. The UK in 40, 50 years time will be an economically very successful country delivering a high quality of life to its inhabitants.”

The day we speak, Nick Boles, the planning minister, has revived memories of the “nasty party” by claiming that young people consider the Tories “aliens”. Mr Grieve sees it as a dilemma for all parties adjusting to an age where the electorate “is very mobile in terms of its allegiances” and sufficiently disenchanted to stop voting altogether. “Nick is highlighting perfectly properly that the Conservative Party has policies which ought to be attractive to groups within society which it doesn’t appear to be attracting or might do more to bring on board.” But he also acknowledges that previously staunch supporters “feel that the party has abandoned its traditional values”.

Then there is the economy. He is startled by how little people worry about it. “They ought to be more worried about the economic foundations of our national wealth. We have pulled back from the brink of disaster but that isn’t to say there isn’t still a lot more to do.” That is where the Tories come in, with their belief in economic efficiency, getting government off people’s backs. Thrift and enterprise, a society which deals with people fairly and equally, and in which the rule of law underpins everything the government does: these are old fashioned conservative views, but, he says, they “need to be adapted to current circumstances and be represented in a way which is relevant to people today, otherwise it just sounds a bit archaic”.

He adds: “I’ve never felt at any time in my years in Parliament that we are somehow as a party straying away from our core values. Our philosophical beliefs have always been adapted to what’s going on around us. And some things politicians can’t change. They can’t change that we are a country of 62 million people living on a crowded island, that we are now ethnically very diverse, that we are interdependent with our European neighbours and will be whatever our final state in terms of the referendum debate, and that we certainly are not in a position to dictate to the rest of the world how they go about their business.”

Mr Grieve is sometimes bemoaned by his colleagues as the Government’s unyielding lawyer. But he is also a Tory, with traditional views. In the past he has been criticised for being too punctilious. “I take that as a compliment. A bit of punctiliousness doesn’t come amiss in politics.”